This invention relates to counter mechanisms and in particular to counter mechanisms for use with postage meters.
A type of postage meter in common use has means to imprint varying postal amounts on individual mail pieces, a selecting mechanism for setting the amount of postage to be imprinted onto a particular item of mail, and counters which perform accounting functions for the value of postage that has been imprinted by the postage meter. The actual postage imprinting is done by a printing die mounted on a rotating shaft. This main shaft rotates once for each imprinting operation and the postage amount that the user has selected by the selector mechanism is imprinted onto the mail piece and the value of this postage is transferred into the counters. Typically, there are two types of counters on the postage meter. One is simply an accumulating counter which shows the total amount of postage that has been imprinted by the postage meter. The second counter is known as a descending counter in that as postage is imprinted by the meter, the value of this postage is subtracted from this second counter. The second counter may be set by the Postal Service for an amount of postage that is purchased by the user. In operation, each of the imprinted postage values are added to the first counter and subtracted from the second counter. The meter will lock itself from further operation when the amount remaining in the descending counter approaches a preset amount. The meter must then be taken to the Postal Service and the second counter reset to indicate the amount of additional postage that has been purchased. With the exception of access by the Postal Service to the descending counter, these counters are completely sealed within the meter to prevent tampering. A postage meter of the abovementioned type is the Model 5300 series manufactured by Pitney-Bowes, Inc. of Stamford, Conn.
A single postage meter is often used by a number of different individuals or by different departments of an organization and it is desirable to keep track of the amount of postage that is used by each of these different users. Because each mail piece may need a different amount of postage imprinted thereon, one cannot simply multiply the number of mail pieces by a single postage amount to determine how much postage has been imprinted. The method commonly used is to manually record the reading of one of the counters before operating the meter and then recording the reading of the same counter after all of the mail pieces have been imprinted. Then it is necessary to subtract one of the readings from the other to determine the amount of postage that was used during the operation of the meter. While this procedure is not a difficult one, it is subject to mistakes in arithmetic and users may forget that they must record the reading of the register before they initiate the operation of the meter. They often remember this procedure only after having imprinted a few mail pieces thus forcing them to add in the amount of the individual pieces already run and further complicating the procedure.
Accordingly, the present invention seeks to overcome these drawbacks by providing an additional counter which is reset by the operator prior to each use of the meter and provides a count of the value of postage that was imprinted during the meter's operation.